THE CLOUD: SMALL BUSINESS REVENUE BUILDER

For a small business owner like you, building and supporting a baseline IT infrastructure that provides reliable 24/7 services to you and your customers can be forbiddingly expensive. Even a wobbly, poorly supported infrastructure can be a budget breaker.

Large capital expenditures, high fixed-labor costs, and endless spending for upgrades don’t have to be your fate. The cloud offers a way out - it can not only save you money, it eliminates a lot of headaches and can spur growth and boost profits. Let’s look at just a few things the cloud can do for you.

CAPEX Most of the expenses of hardware disappear into the cloud. Servers, cabling, all the redundant equipment needed for backup can be handled by a cloud service provider. And more importantly, if you need to ramp up fast for an unexpected surge in business, a cloud service provider can easily accommodate your demands as needed.

DISASTER RECOVERY IS SIMPLIFIED

While you always need disaster recovery plans, the biggest headaches disappear. When you handle everything in-house, considerable expenditures arise if you want high reliability. Redundant equipment, fully loaded with software is required in case of hardware failure. Uninterruptible power supplies to support the full load of all your servers and backups can be extraordinarily expensive. And even if you keep a lot of your infrastructure on-site, the cloud can be used as a reliable data backup system.

LABOR

The cloud can cut and/or re-allocate your IT labor costs. The benefits of the cloud in the area of IT resources are twofold.

First, you will have 24/7 resources to support your infrastructure. Even if you have only minimal in-house support, emergency on-call break/fix services come at very high hourly rates, and cannot always respond fast enough to eliminate downtime. Of course, your cloud fees include the labor needed to support your infrastructure, but you are sharing that labor cost with all the other renters. Economies of scale really step in when it comes to labor, and this is a condition a small business can’t create on its own.

Second, when you migrate to the cloud, your in-house IT resources can be re-directed to strategic IT planning for future growth and boost profit. This staff can now be used for innovation, not just housekeeping.

And finally, the cloud isn't blue- It's green. While big server farms use enormous amounts of energy, they are a more efficient method than equipment dispersed in offices worldwide.

OTHER UNEXPECTED BENEFITS

As you move your IT into the cloud, some unseen expenses go away. The extra office space that houses equipment no longer needs to be leased, or can be used to house other revenue producing resources, like a few new salespeople. The electric power to drive it all doesn’t come free, and the cooling power to keep everything from overheating is often an overlooked cost of in-house infrastructure.

In summary, the cloud lets you save money, move it to more strategic uses, and direct your energies and capital to boost profits and growth, not infrastructure support.